It might be too soon to pronounce on Ilan Volkov's appointment - the Russian is only 25, and the youngest conductor ever to take charge of a BBC orchestra - but first impressions from his Proms debut with the BBCSSO were entirely favourable. The major challenge in his programme was Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, but Volkov negotiated all the potential hazards. He seems a measured, level-headed conductor, and not especially Russian in his style. The first movement was lucidly assembled without rush or hysteria, though the Scherzo that followed was heaped into a formidable wall of sound; the slow movement was full of mysterious half tones (beautiful playing from the BBCSSO) and the finale built to a formidable end.

That careful detail characterised Volkov's accompaniment to Heinrich Schiff in Schumann's Cello Concerto too. But Schiff himself demanded attention, with his understated musicality and sovereign command. Even though the concerto's compact scoring and expressive intimacy seem out of scale in the Albert Hall, Schiff's phrasing was always a thing of beauty, his perfectly tuned chording in the slow movement an object of wonder.

Volkov began this Prom with the British premiere of Judith Weir's The Welcome Arrival of Rain, which his predecessor, Osmo Vanska, introduced last year. Inspired by a passage in the Hindu Bhagavata Purana, the elements of Weir's quarter-hour orchestral evocation seem simple enough - a recurrent Janacek-like brass refrain, a pattering of drums that sets in halfway through and gets more insistent, a pawky trio of bassoons, sky-bound flutes, flaring clarinets - but these ingredients are combined in unexpected ways, through sly orchestral doublings and sleights of pacing. It is an enchanting piece.